It’s inevitable – capitalism has infiltrated the global world system through privatization, international capital, state intervention, and industry displacement.

Under the reign of oligopoly-finance capital, a powerful ideological cluster takes shape that preaches privatization, market deregulation, and retreat from state intervention. However, despite the small government rhetoric, the neoliberal state continually protects the interest of oligopoly-finance capital and plays an important role by facilitating, subsidizing, and building a favourable environment for private capital accumulation. It does all this, of course, without intervening to promote employment and social services (health and education), and without building a safety net for the bottom strata of the society via subsidized food and other basic goods. The state’s macroeconomic policy is confined to monetary adjustments aimed at stabilizing prices. At the same time, its political function involves using the police, military, and public administration to guarantee international finance capital’s access to domestic resources. (To secure these assets, state power backs up finance capital, and both aid industrial capital). The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was key in promoting the global retreat from state intervention in production and distribution. No longer viewed as a mere economic indicator, fiscal deficit emerged in the IMF’s discourse as the main economic problem, its elimination being a necessary precondition for economic growth. The IMF pointed the finger especially at state expenditures in the social sector (subsides to poor people and other welfare programmes) as the main cause of fiscal deficits, ignoring the role played by declining state revenues from custom duties and taxes on corporations. The search for fiscal equilibrium justified privatizing not only state-owned industries and other assets, but even social services such as education and health. The end result defies logic and common sense: a capitalist state that rules “on the masses’ behalf” without providing any services to them. In reality, the state’s (and the IMF’s) objective is to put the masses’ labour power and the country’s resources at the service of oligopoly-finance capital, with a view to accelerating accumulation. Another important feature of today’s capitalism is the displacement of industry towards the developing regions of the world to counterbalance declining profits in the central countries. International capital relies on the developing countries’ states, which have become an integral part of the capitalist world system, to ensure access to cheap labour, raw materials, land, and other resources to accelerate the accumulation process and enhance profits. The peripheral states also intervene in those areas of social life that private corporate capital cannot easily manipulate. For example, their ideological apparatuses present the interests of big capital as identical to national interests. The developing countries’ states also use their repressive apparatuses to displace millions of people and forcibly transfer resources to private corporations, in the name of industrialization and modernization. In this latest phase of capitalism, the state has become oblivious to the real problems that the masses face.